Telecommunications networks have become essential to the day-to-day activities of the enterprise and individuals. Many corporations, agencies, universities, and other institutions now rely on voice, data, and video services to ensure their growth and survival. This trend continues to accelerate as personal communications services (PCS), LAN-to-LAN interconnectivity, image file transfer, and other innovative services are developed and are standardized throughout the operation of the enterprise.
Network management is an important part of telecommunications. It includes operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning functions required to provide, monitor, interpret, and control the network and the services it carries. These functions provide operating telephone companies and their corporate customers and end users with efficient means to manage their resources and services to achieve objectives. There are many different approaches and strategies taken by operating telephone companies, equipment vendors, and users to manage their networks and equipment. Management solutions are often specific to each vendor's networking product environment.
A known prior art network management architecture consists of two layers, the Operational Support System (OSS) layer and an elemental layer. The elemental layer consists of units that implement management commands, detect problems and provide autonomous activities (e.g., protection switching, diagnostics, etc.). This architecture, however, has many disadvantages. First, new elements cannot be added to the network without requiring system changes to support the functionality that the elements offered. Second, changes in the systems that are required to accommodate the addition of new elements are slow to develop due to their size and complexity. Changes have to be prioritized with other changes that are determined to be equally important or critical which delay the introduction of the element capabilities. System changes are expensive and require extensive testing to determine the impact of the change on other system features or element support functions. Third, replacement of the systems is difficult because of the many unique, customized functions that the systems perform for the elements. The only effective replacement for a system is a system that acts the same as the system being replaced.
In developing a network management architecture that overcomes the inefficiency, costliness, and complexity of an existing environment, it is essential to address key service, technical, and business aspects. Key service aspects include enabling rapid new service deployment within both the network and network management system environments and promoting faster service activation. Management or operations systems must be flexible and have a distributed, modular architecture that allows service providers to adapt to future customer needs.
Key business aspects include reducing operations costs, enhancing the flexibility of the operations, administration, maintenance and provisioning environment, and providing services in a competitive, timely manner. Cost reduction can be addressed by simplifying the network, integrating and simplifying operations processes and functions, eliminating redundant databases. Flexibility can be enhanced by incorporating more intelligence into network elements so as to create a functionally based structure that addresses a variety of services and technologies.
Thus, a need exists for a configuration, accounting, service and network management architecture that integrates provisioning, maintenance and change in service functions with network status monitoring and field technician work assignments which enables system changes reflecting service needs and changes to be implemented quickly with reduced expenses and complexity.